Open Science, Open Data and DataCite DOIs

At DataCite we are incredibly proud of supporting Open Science. Over the past several years, DataCite DOIs have been assigned to millions of research datasets. All of these DOIs are an important step towards making data a first-class citizen in scholarly research -- they all deserve a round of applause, but some deserve to be highlighted.

Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves under his general theory of relativity in 1916. It has taken a hundred years to detect them. Following the data collected by LIGO's twin detectors in September 2015, the collision of two black holes sent gravitational waves sand caused ripples in the fabric of space-time. This crash happened 1.3 billion years ago and converted about three times the mass of the sun into gravitational waves, generating a peak power output 50 times that of the entire visible universe.

Similarly, in 2012 CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson after half a century of its first description by Peter Higgs and François Englert. The work paved the way for a Nobel Prize in Physics, which was worked on by more than six thousand physicists that are part of the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations at CERN. The data produced by the LHC accelerator and the two detectors has also a DataCite DOI assigned through CERN.